The term “people of color” (PoC) has proliferated in use as part of our political zeitgeist, and yet, what does it truly mean and for whom? Efrén O. Pérez tackles this question and more in Diversity’s Child: People of Color and the Politics of Identity. This timely book offers us new and important insights into the unanswered questions that persist concerning our understanding of PoC identification. “People of color” is often leveraged as a rallying cry, an appeal for political mobilization, and a call for interracial alliances, invoked in the face of racial oppression or simply used to categorize individuals who are nonwhite. Thus far, scholars of race, ethnicity, and politics have yet to grapple with the psychological and theoretical underpinnings of PoC identity for its ingroup members. As the United States moves toward becoming a majority-minority nation by 2044 (Sandra Colby and Jennifer M. Ortman, “Projection of the Size and Composition of the U.S. Population 2014 to 2060,” United States Census Bureau, March 2015), engaging in a rich undertaking of how PoCs understand this superordinate identity and its political implications is warranted.

From the beginning of Diversity’s Child, Pérez asserts that, thus far, literature on interracial group relations has been primarily focused on cooperative politics and perceptions of discrimination. He contends that one of the key limitations that scholars have faced in their attempts to understand an overarching PoC identity is the lack of proper quantitative measures. Drawing on the common ingroup identity model (Samuel L. Gaertner, Jeffrey Mann, Audrey Murrell, and John Dovidio, “Reducing Intergroup Bias: The Benefits of Recategorization,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 57 [2], 1989), Pérez develops a new theoretical framework for PoC identification. From this perspective, perceiving discrimination toward one’s racial group (Black, Latino, or Asian) is not sufficient to characterize those groups as PoCs, broadly construed. Instead, it is more effective to recategorize individuals based on the commonality that is shared by a diverse set of outgroups. Heightening the salience of this common identity shifts outgroup peers into ingroup members. First, racial and ethnic minority categories are nested under PoC identity, which results in a strong correlation between the two (the nested identities hypothesis). Second, if the nested hypothesis is true, then a situational context that makes PoC identity salient should diminish differences between each PoC group and increase dissimilarities with the outgroup, in this case, whites. Finally, a high level of PoC identification will result in support for policies, initiatives, and attitudes that will benefit specific PoC racial groups (affirmation hypothesis).

Using a multimethod approach of in-person interviews, survey analysis, and innovative experiments, Pérez offers an impressive examination of PoC identification. In a series of candid interviews with members of the nested racial groups, Pérez teases out the perceptions of PoC identity and its meaningfulness to an individual’s sense of self. Informed by these interviews and the aforementioned theory, Pérez constructs a new and concise 4-item measure that assesses the importance of PoC identification at a psychological level to an individual’s sense of self. In a factor analysis of a large sample survey of racial and ethnic minorities, Pérez establishes the uniqueness of PoC ID to racial group attachment while also demonstrating a strong correlation between the two. High levels of PoC ID are not only predictive of positive attitudes and solidarity with PoCs, but also result in support for overarching PoC interests (voting rights and hate crime legislation, as well as support for policies that are specific to a nested group (Black Lives Matter and DACA). The simplicity and robustness of the PoC identity measure cannot be overstated. This new measure is a significant contribution to race, ethnicity, and politics scholarship because it is conceptually grounded and offers ease of use in a variety of political environments.

The PoC identity experiments provide an additional layer of evidentiary support for the activation and accessibility of PoC identity in varying situational contexts. In one set of experiments, Pérez tests how PoC identity is activated when learning about a microaggression directed at members of one’s own racial ingroup or a nested PoC by a white instigator. He finds that Black, Latino, and Asian individuals maintain a consistent affinity to PoC identity, regardless of the target of the microaggression, with Blacks doing so at the highest levels. The second set of experiments tests the activation of PoC ID when PoCs are exposed to messages describing a direct threat to PoCs. Here again, we see that, in the absence of threat, PoC ID remains strong for all nested groups. However, after exposure to the varying treatments of threat, there are negligible differences.

Overall, Pérez’s findings are quite compelling and convincing. As a reader, however, I am left wondering about how PoC identification may be undermined by challenges to commonality across the nested racial/ethnic groups. The survey and experimental test conducted do not include instances of intragroup conflict within the PoC group. How do varying contexts make salient both shared PoC identification and PoC differences? Does this create conflicting circumstances that diminish the likelihood that PoC identification will be activated? For instance, the term BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) has emerged as an alternative to PoC in recent years (Sandra E. Garcia, “Where Did BIPOC Come From?” New York Times, June 2020). Many activists and academics have argued that the term “people of color” erases the severity of the racial injustices and historical experiences of two specific groups: Black and Indigenous people. The shift in nomenclature seems to challenge the necessary condition of recategorization of the ingroup and outgroup that leads to the activation of PoC ID.

The BIPOC consideration dovetails with one of the notable findings from Diversity’s Child: African Americans are seen as the prototypical PoC by Black individuals and members of other nested racial groups (pp. 51–55). Essentially, Blacks are viewed as the “original PoC.” How is the stability of PoC identity influenced by anti-Blackness among non-Black PoC groups? Due to European colonial history, notions of whiteness and anti-Blackness span countries across the globe. Stigmatization toward Black or dark-skinned people is quite common in cultures that dominate many of the non-Black PoC groups (Paula McClain et al., “Group Membership, Group Identity, and Group Consciousness: Measures of Racial Identity in American Politics,” Annual Review of Political Science 12, 2009; and William A Darity, Jason Dietrich, and Derrick Hamilton, “Bleach in the Rainbow: Latino Ethnicity and Preference for Whiteness,” Transforming Anthropology 12 [2], 2008). At times, individuals who are a part of these non-Black PoC groups are often the ones perpetrating anti-Blackness against Black people (Claudia Jean Kim, “Are Asians the New Blacks? Affirmative Action, Anti-Blackness and the ‘Sociometry’ of Race,” DuBois Review 15 [2], 2018). These types of internal PoC conflicts seem likely to erode the strength of PoC ID for certain groups.

Diversity’s Child is a book that we will be discussing in the field for years to come. Pérez demonstrates the quantitative approaches that can be leveraged effectively to establish new measures and the rigorous empirical testing that can be used to understand the specific context in which they are the most salient. There is intellectual terrain that remains to be explored for a better understanding of ingroup attachments and cooperative politics, and Diversity’s Child makes a compelling case for further work that explores PoC identification.